Page 49

Chapter 43

Lotte

Lotte’s vision tilted violently as the world shifted around her in a blink.

A second ago, it had been bright afternoon in the garden, a trial coming to life around them. Now it was pitch-dark outside the window of her grandmother’s office. Lotte had the vertiginous feeling of having been wrenched from one time and place to another in the blink of an eye. She felt suddenly nauseous.

“I’m going to be sick.” Clemency echoed Lotte’s thoughts as the room continued to spin around her. Next to her, Nora was bracing herself against the desk, shaking violently.

“No, you’re going to pull yourself together,” Mercy Holtzfall’s cool voice sounded. The older woman gradually came into focus. She was sitting at her desk, hands folded. Lined in front of her were four golden compact mirrors. Memory charms, Lotte remembered. Like the one her mother had used on the maid. Lotte looked down, finding a bleeding cut on her arm, with no idea how she got it. Her breaths started to come fast and shallow with panic.

Mercy Holtzfall had taken memories from her. From all of them. Hours and hours of memories, if the dark sky outside was anything to go by. She could have taken days or weeks for all Lotte knew.

Clemency and Modesty looked as disheveled as Lotte felt. Dresses ripped, dirt caked into their fingernails, hair snarled. But Nora. Nora looked like she had clawed her way out of the hall of the Undermountain King. Her entire body was covered in welts and scratches, blood was smeared across her face, and she was coated with a thin layer of ash. Like she had walked through a fire.

“Why?” Nora’s voice sounded scraped raw too, like she couldn’t get any more words out. But the ones she didn’t say echoed through Lotte too. Why would you take our memories? What could be so bad that you would take this from us?

“To protect you.” Mercy pulled off a ring that stood out against the rest of the gleaming jewelry that adorned her. A plain wooden ring. This, Lotte realized, must be her own Veritaz ring. The one she had won in her own generation’s trials. Distantly, it occurred to Lotte that she had no idea what virtues her grandmother had proven in her trials.

She pressed the ring to the wall next to her desk. The wallpaper gave way under the pressure of the wooden ring, a hidden keyhole seeming to appear around it.

And in the wallpaper, a door opened.

Cold, damp air rushed out of the door, washing Lotte with a sudden sense of familiarity that she couldn’t place. Behind the door, a long stone corridor extended as far as the eye could see. The walls were lined with charm after charm. Hundreds of stolen memories held inside memorandums. Mercy turned as if to gather the four on the table. But Clemency interrupted suddenly. “Where’s Constance?”

Constance. She was so interchangeable with Clemency that Lotte hadn’t even noticed her absence in the confusion. But she saw it now. There were only four of them lined up across the desk. Only four mirrors. Only four sets of memories.

Mercy Holtzfall paused in the doorway, looking severe. “Constance did not survive.”

Her words hit Clemency first, her breaths coming short and fast as she sank to the ground. Modesty moved down, crouching next to her, trying to hold her up as Clemency fell apart.

Constance was dead.

“The story has already gone out to the papers,” Mercy Holtzfall carried on calmly. “The Grims, in protest of losing the election, tried to subvert the democratic process and staged an attack at the governor’s victory party. A bomb. Thousands across the city will report seeing a great pillar of fire around nightfall. Constance died bravely defending the governor’s life.”

“That’s ridiculous. Where would the Grims get a bomb?” Nora was still doubled over, but she sounded angry.

Lotte knew before their grandmother spoke.

“From LAO Industries, of course.” Mercy rounded on Nora, even as Lotte felt a sudden surge of guilt. “There was a break-in today.”

Theo. She had told him she would get Nora’s help. And instead…she had asked about the bloodvenn first. She had thought there would be time enough for both. If she had anticipated that a trial would sweep them up before she could warn her about the break-in, would she still have gone after her own answers first?

“A break-in?” Nora looked up from the desk.

“Yes.” Mercy’s anger seemed real and sharp, directed at Nora now. “Who could say what inventions of Leyla’s they stole. Charms. Bombs. Weapons we don’t even know of yet.”

“This wasn’t a Grim attack,” Lotte spoke up, clutching at something that would ease the guilt. “It was a trial.”

“And how do you know that?” Mercy Holtzfall turned on her. “None of you have any new rings to prove that there was ever a third trial.” Lotte’s gaze dashed swiftly across her cousins’ hands and her own. She was right, the only rings were the two on Modesty’s hand.

“Holtzfalls have failed trials before.” Nora’s voice was unsteady with pain. “Contestants have died in trials before.”

“And just days ago, Grims tried to kill your cousin. What seems more likely? That you all failed or that a Grim assassination succeeded?”

“If that’s what Grandmother says happened—” Modesty started.

“Oh, shut up,” Nora’s voice rasped out, lunging toward Modesty.

Lotte saw her chance. She moved backward, as if jostled by the lunge. Letting her hand fall over the small charm where her memories were locked.

It was like reading a mind. Except it was her own.

It was a trial. Lotte remembered.

The garden had moved with a mind of its own, until Lotte and Nora were standing in a maze.

Finally it stopped, leaving silence where there had been chaos. They both remained still, distantly aware of the sounds beyond the maze. Both waiting to see if some new threat would spring out of the brambles around them.

When nothing did, the next step of this trial had seemed obvious. To solve the maze.

Lotte and Nora hadn’t spoken, the uncertainty of what had passed between them in the moments before the trial hanging there. It was that uncertainty that made Lotte turn and walk away from Nora.

She didn’t want Nora to see the humiliation and the hurt written all over her face.

She had made the mistake of trusting Nora. Of thinking of her as a friend, when she’d only been using her. Exactly like Modesty had. Nora had just been cleverer about it.

If the trial was to solve the maze, Lotte was going to need a head start.

It was a matter of minutes before her path crossed with Nora’s again. She walked past her. Only for a few turns later to find herself face-to-face with her cousin again. And again. Until finally the sixth time Nora had broken the silence.

She’d said she thought the maze was moving. She said she didn’t think this was a test to solve the maze. Somehow, wordlessly, they fell into step together. Lotte remembered thinking that she saw shapes in the hedges. Like bodies had been caught there when the maze had taken form.

The sky above them drifted into late afternoon when Lotte finally had to stop. She sank to the ground, pulling off the shoes that were making her feet ache. Nora took a few steps before realizing she wasn’t following.

She waited.

Then backtracked and waited.

And finally sank down to the ground opposite her.

And when Nora spoke again she told her the truth. She told her that her mother’s murder had been staged, faked. Nora had only come close to speaking about her mother once. When she had told Lotte that life was not fair. Nora didn’t wear vulnerability naturally. But she donned it, alone with Lotte in the maze as she told her everything. That she had toyed with the idea of trading Lotte’s father’s name for her answers.

It had almost sounded like an apology.

And in turn Lotte had told Nora about Alaric.

She told her about the Grims ransoming him for a ring. About the hold they had over Theo. About the factory and the choice he had to make, just like Nora had, between treason and loyalty.

When Nora had stood again she extended a hand to help Lotte up. And in her grip Lotte had read everything. That she intended to get Alaric back. That she would not betray Lotte.

That she could trust her.

The silence was different after that. Or perhaps they talked. Lotte’s memory was faint on that. Because of what came afterward. They walked and walked until finally, as the sun was setting, the maze opened up for them.

For a wild, hopeful moment, Lotte thought it was a way out. But instead it was an open clearing with paths that led back into the maze at each corner. They hadn’t found the way out; they’d found the very middle.

The clear area of grass was littered with leftover chaos from the party. Dropped glasses and canapés, discarded shoes as people had fled. And in the middle was one of the gold-and-silver trees. Glass apples filled with drinks still hung off it.

Moments later, three other figures stumbled out from entrances on the other side. Modesty, Constance, and Clemency. Looking as fed up and disheveled as Lotte felt. Nora somehow still looked unfazed by the trial.

Until she didn’t.

The moment all five of them were in the clearing, the pathways into the maze sealed behind them.

Now what? one of them asked. Reading the memory in the mirror, Lotte wasn’t entirely sure who had spoken. But the second the question was asked, the maze answered. The hedges, which had been still since imprisoning them, began to grow again, closing in around them.

And all at once, everything descended into bickering. The five of them arguing over how to survive this. Whether to hack the maze back, or burn it, or try to break through it.

Until it became clear the only way out was up.

The panic and the fear in the memory made it choppy. But Lotte remembered them climbing. They’d pulled themselves up the immense silver-and-gold oak in the middle. Trying not to cut themselves on the jagged edges of the metal leaves even as the hedges closed around them. They reached down for each other, pulling up, giving leverage to climb. For a time, it seemed like the bickering had faded into actual cooperation. Except, as each hand Lotte clasped broke past the barriers of her hindern, she was overwhelmed with how much bitterness she tasted in their minds. Constance and Clemency lived with so much jealousy. They could not accept less than the heirship because it would mean they were less, which was already what their grandmother thought of them.

And Nora.

Lotte had never read a mind like Nora’s before. It was like a burst of thoughts all exploding at once and meshing into one perfectly formed conclusion faster than Lotte could possibly track it. Nora had thought when they entered this trial that it was a trial of intelligence. That she would be sipping champagne at the exit with a ring on her hand waiting for the rest of them within an hour. But she had been mapping the maze’s movement as she went. There was no logic to it. What was she missing? If this wasn’t a trial of intelligence, what was it testing? Temperance and bravery were already gone. What did that leave? All the history of the Holtzfalls stormed in her mind at once as she considered past trials.

Justice. Selflessness. Charity. Wisdom. Honesty. Fairness. Prudence. Loyalty.

Unity.

It crashed to the front of her mind all at once. There had been a test of unity three generations ago. All four Holtzfall siblings had been trapped together. They had all come out of it with rings. In the history of the trials, that was the only generation where every competitor won a way into the woods.

Now this was their chance.

They could all get out of here with rings on their hands.

They were almost at the top.

The brambles were close enough that Lotte could feel them clawing at her arms as she dragged herself the last few feet up toward the top of the hedges.

Clemency reached the top first. She reached out, pulling Lotte after her. The brambles that made up the hedge were so densely woven together that it was like landing on solid ground.

Lotte turned, dragging Modesty after her.

And Modesty’s thoughts cascaded through Lotte.

These weren’t petty jealousies like Constance and Clemency. Loathing stretched like a vast burned field through Modesty. Years of resentment that had dug deep claws into Modesty’s mind, making it bleed spite and rage that she hid with a smile. All of it was aimed at Nora, her cousin who had everything handed to her, while all Modesty did was work so much more for so much less.

Nora took everything. She never let anyone else have anything. And she’d had the gall to speak about the Grims and their poverty like she knew about wanting. It only stoked Modesty’s determination to take everything from Nora.

She pulled her hand away as soon as Modesty was safely up, but she felt the darkness of those thoughts clinging to her. Lotte reached down for Nora, even as the walls of the maze closed around her.

Modesty moved faster than Lotte had thought she could. She lunged at Lotte, twisting her wrist hard, making Lotte cry out in pain as her fingers jerked open.

And Nora fell.

Knocking Constance down after her.

Lotte had screamed their names, but it was too late. The hedge had closed around them, swallowing them in the brambles.

And when Lotte had turned, Modesty was watching her with coldness in her eyes. No one will believe you.

After that, it was a blur. Somehow they reached the edge of the maze, clambering across the now-solid stretch of brambles. They made it back to the grass where, just hours ago, the wealthy of Walstad had gathered. It was empty except for Holtzfalls and knights rushing toward them, Lotte falling to her knees. Benedict knelt beside her.

Modesty burst into dramatic fake tears. Cries of how their cousins fell. How they tried to save them.

Liar! Lotte remembered the word ripping from her throat. She didn’t care if no one believed her. You killed them! Somehow she was scuffling with Modesty.

Distantly, through the pain and the rage, she was aware of Theo pulling her off Modesty. She could feel his thoughts thrumming through his chest pressed against her back as she fought him.

And she felt his loss. She felt the agony of his disloyalty as he had stood by while the Grims took their fill of LAO. Because Lotte failed to tell Nora in time. Before this impossible trial took her. Killed her.

Lotte wasn’t aware of what she was screaming incoherently when suddenly Clemency cried out.

It took Lotte a moment to see what Clemency had. There was smoke rising from the middle of the deep brambles. Just a wisp at first, but as they watched, it grew. And grew. And then Lotte saw the fire, the blaze growing inside the maze like a burning heart.

In no time, the whole maze was alight. Distantly, Lotte was aware of charms going up in the hands of the older generation of Holtzfalls, shielding them from the smoke as they all silently watched. Unsure if this was part of the trial or something else. Lotte was too afraid to hope.

Until finally, the fire died out, leaving only ash and petrified brambles behind where the maze had been. And in the middle were two forms.

Nora.

She was on her hands and knees, bloody and burned and covered in ash. She was clutching two of the metal leaves from that stupid golden tree in her hand. As Lotte got closer, she could see that she had carved symbols onto them. Crude makeshift charms to burn the maze and shield herself.

The other shape was what was left of the metal tree. It had warped and twisted in the heat into an ugly, gnarled ancient-looking thing. Branches melted so they drooped and dug into the ground. And gripped in its melted, gnarled fingers was a body.

It wasn’t moving.

After that, all Lotte remembered was screaming. Clemency screaming her grief. Nora screaming accusations at Modesty. Modesty screaming her innocence. Screaming that it was Nora and her fire that had killed Constance.

Someone had loaded them all into automobiles. Got them past the cameras waiting outside and to the mansion.

And then, just as abruptly as they were taken, the memories ended.

All of it, Lotte knew in the space of a blink. She withdrew her hand from the mirror as fast as she’d touched it. Unnoticed even as her grandmother flicked a finger, driving Nora and Modesty apart by magic.

“You will pull yourselves together now .” Mercy Holtzfall’s voice was raised. “You will tell the story I have told you. And you will trust that anything that I have done is for the good of this family. Like everything I do.”

“Yes, Grandmama.” But it was only Modesty who replied.

Clemency was still on the floor.

Lotte was choked with knowledge and anger.

Nora was the only other person in the room echoing Lotte’s feelings.

Lotte reached for her cousin, but Nora’s rage turned to action swiftly. And in a second she was gone.